On 03/02/2018 10:10 PM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
Well, debian-installer normally does not allow you to choose the partition table type.
I remember I had a problem - which must be due to that behaviour in hindsight - when I used a GPT partitioned disk from an rx2620 in a rp3440. Although the installer created a different partition layout it continued to use the GPT partitioning scheme and whan palo should be installed it failed miserably.
On x86, it will automatically use GPT if the machine is booted in EFI mode. On sparc64, we would normally just switch to GPT if the machine supports GPT.
I understand. Then it's safe to just use the subarch to select how GRUB2 should be installed, although it's really not less complex than using the variable.
I don’t know how debian-installer behaves if you boot an x86 machine in EFI mode which has an MFT partition table, but I think that’s not supported by debian-installer. For now it should be reasonable to assume GPT partioning on a machine that supports it and defaulting to Sun otherwise. Please don’t let‘s us over-engineer this just to be able the rare case that someone used Sun partition tables from a previous installation on a machine that supports GPT. I know you try to make the most compatible design to fit all use cases, but I don’t think we should support such edge cases when debian-installer doesn’t support it on other platforms.
Ok, makes sense.